The tradition of learning French is dying. So much for multiculturalism

One of the unintended consequences of writing the book The Diversity Illusion is that I started learning French, which I had neglected since school. It wasn’t the only or even main reason, of course: when I visited the country, my instinctive youthful Anglo-Saxon aversion to all things Gallic was swept aside by a overwhelming passion and love for French history, the French landscape and of course the French language.

But writing about multiculturalism in Britain, the system that arose as a result of mass immigration, reinforced my interest in what is sometimes called “soft multiculturalism”, the term applied to more natural, small-scale cultural interaction – going to night school to learn another language, finding out about German classical music or Turkish architecture or Sufi texts.

One of the paradoxes of the diversity illusion is that the idea that somehow importing millions of people across the world will make people more “multicultural”; I went to a multi-ethnic school in central London and all my peers were uniformly immersed in American popular culture. Believe it or not but we didn’t sit around discussing Zoroastrianism or the Sacred Book of the East; I learned a couple of Armenian swear words but that’s about it. The soft multiculturalism I did enjoy came from learning, in a style of teaching that (luckily for us) had remained the norm in our school while being abandoned by much of the teaching profession.

The latest report says that languages are becoming more popular in the last few years of secondary schools because of the “EBacc” but warns that many less-able pupils are actively encouraged not to study the subjects.

In all, one-in-five state schools “disapply lower-ability pupils from having to study a language at all” because the subject is seen as too hard.

Teresa Tinsley, the report’s author, who has carried out extensive research on language trends for the British Academy and British Council, said there was a perception that Spanish was a “global language” because of its use in Central and South America, resulting in a rise in entries.

That’s a real shame, but the whole “diversity” gig was always about ideological purity, rather than the lived experience – you don’t have to understand, or really care about, foreign cultures, so long as you embrace the idea of London as a global city and feel a vague fluffy warmness to everyone. Likewise, the biggest supporters of the European Union don’t actually care that British children are no longer learning French or German, and are therefore being cut off from two immensely rich cultures.

The new Government is trying to reverse this trend, but once a tradition ends it’s easy to keep it ended; the historical tradition of teaching French has been broken, so there’s inevitably going to be a move towards Spanish, which is more global (and American).

German and Italian are even less useful than French in the wider scheme of things (certainly less so than Arabic, which perhaps should be the eighth foreign language on the Government’s list), but there’s surely an argument that children should be taught these languages because it opens up their mind to a new culture and, as Charlemagne said, gives them another soul.

How tragically insular our new multicultural society will be if the Government fails. And how sad that, as with many of these ideological ideas (including mass immigration), it will only further open up the class divide between the knows and the know-nots.